I think deterrence is the major thing missing from that analysis.
We don't just want to wait until people do something wrong the first time and then decide whether they look likely to do it again. If we did that, there'd be a general perception that you could get away with a crime if you could argue convincingly in court that it had been a one-off. (I don't know - for example, perhaps someone who murdered their father could argue that it didn't imply anything very much about their general safety for anyone else to be around, because only their father had ever had the opportunity to commit whatever acts of egregious mis-parenting in their childhood had inspired their murderous inclination.)
Instead, there needs to be some kind of means of discouraging even one-off offences, and the best method we have for that is to be seen to have punished people for them in the past.
And that's where you need to drag some notion of culpability back in, because you don't want to make people live in fear of being punished as a result of some chain of circumstances they had no control over, or give them the idea that they're probably going to get punished anyway and may as well get the benefits of the crime while they're about it. You're only trying to exert your deterring effect on people's intentional choices, so you have to (do your best to) only punish for deterrence purposes if an intentional choice was involved.
I think the only thing I'd add to that is that, y'know, it can rapidly become difficult to figure out whether someone *meant* to do a thing or not, and if the system leans on "did you have control over this" to decide which choices to "disincentivize", people will start finding ways to claim that they didn't have a choice.
Your example in the second paragraph reads like a "burning bed" defense, which is accepted in some courts. Essentially, it's a form of premeditation which is also considered self defense.
I'd like to point out that murderers, especially burning bed types, have extremely low rates of recidivism.
Also, I don't think the punishment paradigm is necessarily an effective deterrent. Murder rates per 100,000 of population tend to be higher in states with the death penalty, for instance. Those burning bed cases? If there weren't social deterrents in place against less extreme solutions, then murder wouldn't have been on the table.
Essentially, there are a whole group of violent criminals who accept that they'll be punished, sometimes to an extreme degree, but still think it's better than continuing to be under the thumb of an abuser.
@londo, it's usually easy to tell when someone has a legitimate "let's kill the abuser" defense. Unlike most criminals, they tend to be nearby the crime scene awaiting the arrival of the police or waiting somewhere they think the police will check for them like a relative's house. They go quietly. If the cops had to hunt for them, it's a different matter.
We don't just want to wait until people do something wrong the first time and then decide whether they look likely to do it again. If we did that, there'd be a general perception that you could get away with a crime if you could argue convincingly in court that it had been a one-off. (I don't know - for example, perhaps someone who murdered their father could argue that it didn't imply anything very much about their general safety for anyone else to be around, because only their father had ever had the opportunity to commit whatever acts of egregious mis-parenting in their childhood had inspired their murderous inclination.)
Instead, there needs to be some kind of means of discouraging even one-off offences, and the best method we have for that is to be seen to have punished people for them in the past.
And that's where you need to drag some notion of culpability back in, because you don't want to make people live in fear of being punished as a result of some chain of circumstances they had no control over, or give them the idea that they're probably going to get punished anyway and may as well get the benefits of the crime while they're about it. You're only trying to exert your deterring effect on people's intentional choices, so you have to (do your best to) only punish for deterrence purposes if an intentional choice was involved.
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I think the only thing I'd add to that is that, y'know, it can rapidly become difficult to figure out whether someone *meant* to do a thing or not, and if the system leans on "did you have control over this" to decide which choices to "disincentivize", people will start finding ways to claim that they didn't have a choice.
But, yeah. Good call.
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I'd like to point out that murderers, especially burning bed types, have extremely low rates of recidivism.
Also, I don't think the punishment paradigm is necessarily an effective deterrent. Murder rates per 100,000 of population tend to be higher in states with the death penalty, for instance. Those burning bed cases? If there weren't social deterrents in place against less extreme solutions, then murder wouldn't have been on the table.
Essentially, there are a whole group of violent criminals who accept that they'll be punished, sometimes to an extreme degree, but still think it's better than continuing to be under the thumb of an abuser.
@londo, it's usually easy to tell when someone has a legitimate "let's kill the abuser" defense. Unlike most criminals, they tend to be nearby the crime scene awaiting the arrival of the police or waiting somewhere they think the police will check for them like a relative's house. They go quietly. If the cops had to hunt for them, it's a different matter.
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